Leaks fallout: How bad could it be?

Experts say there will likely be some harm to U.S. intelligence efforts. | AP Photo

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) have said the call-tracking program helped prosecute a participant in the deadly Mumbai rampage in 2008 and helped head off a plot to bomb the New York City subways in 2009.

And Feinstein said there were more successes she could not outline publicly.

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“The instances where this has produced good — has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks — is all classified, that’s what’s so hard about this. So that we can’t actually go in there and other than the two that have been released give the public an actual idea of people that have been saved, attacks that have been prevented, that kind of thing,” she said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Still, skeptics such as Udall look at the same facts without seeing the same utility.

“I am not convinced that it’s uniquely valuable intelligence that we could not have generated in other ways,” Udall told ABC.

While Clapper has pointed to some terrorism-related successes that could be impacted by the leaks, he’s also suggested that the damage could be felt in other areas. The PRISM program is used to search not only for suspected terrorist communications but also data on nuclear proliferation, cyberattacks and foreign governments’ intelligence operations.

Former officials said major intelligence services like those operated by the Chinese and the Russian governments probably didn’t learn anything new from the intelligence programs that were the subject of leaks last week. However, the large powers may have picked up diplomatic leverage from the apparently related leak of a top-secret Obama directive ordering officials to draw a list of potential targets for cyberwarfare.

The most certain impact of disclosures may be a loss of business for U.S. Internet and social media firms. One of the PowerPoint pages disclosed by The Guardian lists services such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Skype. Privacy-sensitive users in places like Europe may try to find other providers. That could strengthen those foreign businesses and lead to more Web content being harder for U.S. intelligence to reach or even winding up beyond its reach.

“We just punished American businesses who are just obeying U.S. law,” Hayden said.

However, Brenner said if terrorists decide not to communicate via the Internet or phones, that could carry some benefits by impeding their operations.

“If you’re able to drive your opponents completely off the network, you’ve lost something because they are are harder to track,” he said. “On the other hand, you’ve made them resort to very ineffective, old-fashioned forms of communication.”